Obamacare: What’s at Stake if it’s Repealed
05/17/2013
By Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services
More than three years ago, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act and President Obama signed it into law. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld it. Millions of Americans have already benefited from its provisions, and millions more are looking forward to benefits that will soon go into effect. And in November, the American people re-elected the president as an affirmation of the law’s promise that no person should go broke if they get sick.
Yet today, for nearly the 40th time since it’s been the law of the land, House Republicans staged yet another repeal vote in their latest attempt to turn back the clock on progress and deny Americans health insurance coverage they can count on.
For the 37th time, Congress is voting to repeal the health care law, the Affordable Care Act.
Learn what’s at stake for Americans if the law were repealed.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Healthcorpus, an avatar to cure miscommunication
05/09/2013
Do you have an ache or health question? Would you like to know more about a body part or learn more about a health topic? With healthcorpus, you can click anywhere on the virtual body to show where it hurts and describe symptoms. That way you can better describe your condition to family, friends or your doctor. You and your doctor can also use healthcorpus to find the most relevant medical articles and information related to your selection.
Create a page and edit text – Start writing your health-related pages straightaway. Format as you like, include images and link to content on the web.
Click body to add a marker – Browse the human anatomy, find relevant body parts and click to mark the locations you want to highlight.
Drag marker to text – Drag and drop the marker into your text to link your note with the body.
Keep it private or share it – Once your page is written, you can keep it private, share it with a secret link via email, or share it with everyone as a public page.
Patients can use this free tool to communicate with their doctor, and the doc can use it to better communicate with patients. That’s important for several reasons.
Patients often complain that doctors don’t seem to actually listen to what they’re telling them, instead staring at a computer screen and tapping on a keyboard. Likewise, nearly 80% of patients forget what the doctor tells them as soon as they leave the office or are discharged from the hospital, and 50% of what they do remember is incorrect, according to this report in the Wall Street Journal.
Healthcorpus shows promise as a cure for miscommunication. Click here to see the sample I created using this text.
Top 5 ways Getting Older gets us down
05/08/2013
By Sandy Getzky
Few things in life are guaranteed, yet getting older seems to come with some rather predictable frustrations. I’ve assembled the top five ways that getting older can bring us down — and how to get over all that and live life to the fullest. Remember that no matter how drab things get: getting older always beats the alternative.
1. Body Pains
“Sometimes I call my grandson for a joint to help the joint pain”
As we get older we are constantly worried about: “what will go next?” These days it seems like hands go first. Typing becomes slower and more painful. Growing up I was told a stiff handshake was a sign of a strong, assertive individual. Now I meet people and just hope they go for the hug and spare my fragile digits. Read the rest of this entry »
Secret Hospital Charges Now Revealed, Wide Disparities
05/08/2013
Hospital Prices No Longer Secret As New Data Reveals Bewildering System, Staggering Cost Differences
By Jeffrey Young and Chris Kirkham
When a patient arrives at Bayonne Hospital Center in New Jersey requiring treatment for the respiratory ailment known as COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, she faces an official price tag of $99,690.
Less than 30 miles away in the Bronx, N.Y., the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center charges only $7,044 for the same treatment, according to a massive federal database of national health care costs made public on Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »
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TIME & SLEEP — America’s Real Deficit Crisis
05/03/2013
By Arianna Huffington (comment at Huffington Post)
Are you busy right now? Are you already behind on what you wanted to accomplish today? Or this week? Or this year? Are you hoping this will be a short post so you can get back to the million things on your to-do list that are breathing down your neck? Okay, I’ll get on with it: Our culture is obsessed with time. This is our real deficit crisis, and one that, unlike the more commonly discussed deficit, is actually getting worse.
In order to manage time — or what we delude ourselves into thinking of as managing time — we rigidly schedule ourselves, rushing from meeting to meeting, event to event, always just a little late and trying to save a bit of time here, a little bit there. We download apps for “productivity” and eagerly click on links promising time-saving life-hacks. We fear that if we don’t try to cram as much as possible into our day, we might be missing out on something fun, or important, or special.
The Wheelchair Gym
05/03/2013
Do you have a favorite product to tell others about? Here’s one I learned about from Richard Marcantonio. He’s 83 and designed an interesting piece of exercise equipment for mildly to severely disabled individuals. Special grips allow those with conditions such as Cerebral Palsy and Muscular Dystrophy to regain improved movement and strength in core-muscles groups.
From Richard: “The Wheelchair Gym was design for the growing wheelchair or power-chair population. It’s an undeserved group, and to that end I developed this simple, user-friendly piece of equipment called The Wheelchair Gym.”
Learn more at http://www.lotechusa.com/
Bionic Eye Gives Hope for the Blind
05/03/2013
The Bionic Eye will improve over time with increased resolution. (simulation)
Dr. Mark Humayun was going to be a doctor all along, but when a family member lost her eyesight, he soon began his journey as an innovator. “When I was going through medical school, my grandmother went blind and there was really no cure for her,” the Duke University graduate says. “And it made me rethink my career and focus more on how to restore sight to those who are going blind.”
Now a professor at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Humayun has invented the Argus Ocular Implant, which allows blind patients to see again. According a press release on the school’s website, the intraocular retinal prosthesis “restores some visual capabilities for patients whose blindness is caused by Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). RP is an inherited retinal degenerative disease that affects about 100,000 people nationwide.”
Read the rest of the story and comment at Huffington Post.
Future implications
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Study: Vision Loss and Assistive Technologies Vary Widely
05/01/2013
Low Vision Survey Results
Results of WebAIM’s recent survey for those with low vision are now available at http://webaim.org/projects/lowvisionsurvey/. A few highlights are found below. The results of our motor disabilities survey will be available soon.
This data underscores that users with low vision are very diverse. The range of vision loss varies greatly, as do the assistive technologies used. The vast majority of respondents use multiple assistive technologies, ranging from screen readers to simply changing text sizes in browsers. There is very high keyboard use in this population, strengthening arguments for ensuring keyboard accessibility. Read the rest of this entry »
Meals On Wheels Sequestration Cuts Take Effect
04/30/2013
By Arthur Delaney (original on Huffington Post)
ROANOKE, Va. — William McCormick remembers from his working-class upbringing in Covington, Va., that neighbors took care of neighbors.
“Both my parents worked in the mill,” he said. “For people in the neighborhood who were hungry we’d make up two or three bags of groceries, put $5 or $10 in it, set it on the porch, knock on the door and leave. We wouldn’t tell ‘em who did it.”
Now McCormick is 70 years old and living alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a six-story building. Only about 40 of the building’s 144 units are occupied. The parking lots are barren and the hallways are dingy with torn carpets. McCormick considers the building “spooky.”
Some Disturbing Stats:
- There are already 40M seniors 65+ today, with 10,000 more reaching age 65 every day.
- 40% of them are low-income (below 150% of poverty level) and will need public assistance.
- The poverty threshold for a family of four is $22,113, and the 2010 average income of the bottom 90% was $26.364.
- People 90+ had a median income of just $14,760 in 2010, about half of it from Social Security. 37.3% of them lived alone and depend on services like Meels on Wheels.
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The Internet of Things: Prediction
04/22/2013
Le Web Paris (see video) explores a future of technology that connects everyday devices all the time, often described as The Internet of Things.
This story and video from Reuters and the Huffington Post form the basis of my own observations and developer recommendations as a 30-year IBM technologist, futurist and Digital Home consultant. Included at the end are four interesting infographics from Cisco, Intel, Casaleggio Associati, and Beecham Research. Read the rest of this entry »
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